“Peace Be With You”
John 20:19-31
4/8/07 - Easter Sunday
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Christ is risen! He is risen indeed!
Alleluia! Grace, mercy, and peace be to you from God our Father
and from our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ... Amen.
In today’s Gospel text the one word that keeps
popping up is the word “peace.” Our resurrected Lord
Jesus announces it to His disciples three different times here.
It’s a word that we’d like to see actualized more
today. It’s talked about a lot; we often hear the word
“peace,” and yet the reality of it seems so elusive.
It either never comes at all, or if it does come it doesn’t seem
to last. We hear about negotiations for peace in the Middle-east
between Israel and the Palestinians all the time, but we wonder whether
there will ever be a lasting peace there. We have hopes for peace
in Iraq and Afghanistan, but we doubt that there will ever be peace in
those regions either. And now we worry about the possibility of
conflict with Iran and the disruption of peace that country has brought
about, and we wonder if peace can be restored in this situation as well.
Throughout the world, whether it’s between
countries and peoples, between families and friends, between co-workers
and strangers, whether it’s on the job or in our own homes, where
two or more sinners are gathered together, there will be conflict and a
disruption of peace at some time or another. But the greatest
conflict and disruption of peace occurs every day as the result of your
warfare against God. Every time you sin, the battle between your
will and God’s will continues. Every time you break one of
God’s commandments (whether it’s by doing something
you’re not supposed to do, or by not doing something you are
supposed to do), you show yourself to be an enemy of God at
heart. When you put money, pleasure, sleep, friendships, or
anything else before God, you show hatred of Him. When you bear
His Name, yet live like an unbeliever, cursing with His Name, never
calling upon it in trouble, nor with it praying, praising, or giving
thanks to God, you show yourself to be apathetic to His promises.
When you withhold yourself from His gifts and treat His Word and His
Sacraments with contempt, you display rejection of and rebellion
against Him. And those are just your infractions against the
first three commandments. By breaking the rest of the
commandments you show not only enmity towards God but towards your
fellow human beings as well, who are created in His image. You
don’t live to serve them, but yourself. You love yourself
more than you love them. You can’t help putting yourself
and your needs and wants over others. You are the most important
person to you. In fact, you are your own god, and as a result,
when the true God came to you in the flesh you put Him to death.
You and I were both there on Good Friday calling for His
execution. With every sin we commit, you and I together whipped
and beat Him. We mocked Him, spat upon Him, and placed a crown of
thorns upon His head. And we drove the nails into His hands and
feet, ridiculed Him, watched Him die, and then pierced His side with a
spear.
And now you expect to hear words of peace??
The words you deserve to hear are “You’re condemned to
hell!” All God has ever wanted for you is to confess your
sins, to repent of them, to return to Him in faith to be embraced by
His love, to stop going down the path that leads to death and get back
on the path that leads to life. But you fight against Him all the
time, and the question has to be asked, “How is this conflict
going to be resolved?” We ought to know that fighting
against God is a losing battle. He’s going to win in the
end. Most wars end by one side defeating the other somehow.
God could easily end the conflict between us and Him by pulverizing us
into the ground. With one little word He could take away your
breath and you would return to the dust from which He created
you. And His judgment wouldn’t end there. Jesus says
somewhere else, “Don’t fear those who kill the body but
cannot kill the soul. Rather fear Him who can destroy both soul
and body in hell.”
God could easily have ended this warfare that
we’ve waged against Him with a show of His omnipotent
force. But there’s another way to end a war, and
that’s by one side surrendering to the other. Dead in our
trespasses and sins we couldn’t surrender to God; we neither had
the ability, the will, nor the desire to surrender to Him. So,
God is the one who surrendered. God became man in order to
surrender. He surrendered to a number of things. He
surrendered to a life of humility, a life in which He did not make full
use of His power and glory as God, a life in which He lived as a poor,
simple man yet without ceasing to be God. He emptied Himself, as
the Apostle Paul writes, taking upon Himself the form of a
servant. He surrendered to His Father’s will, perfectly
obeying and fulfilling all God’s commandments and words for you
in your place, as well as laying down His life on the cross as the
sacrifice for your sins. In surrendering to the cross, He
surrendered Himself to you and the devil. At the cross He let
your will and the devil’s will be done to Him. He let evil
have its way with Him. And so, He surrendered to sin, death, and
hell, allowing Himself to suffer all of these things in order to bring
an end to the warfare between you and God.
Now, most people might look upon this surrender of
Jesus as a defeat for God. After all, God dead on a cross
doesn’t look like God wins. But, in fact, this was His
greatest victory, a victory confirmed by His bodily resurrection from
the dead. Jesus’ resurrection marks the end of the warfare
between you and God. The words of peace that the risen Jesus
announces to His disciples confirm this. He would have been
justified in announcing God’s wrath to them. For our guilt
in crucifying Him and putting Him to death we don’t deserve to
hear words of peace but words of condemnation. Perhaps this is
why at first when the disciples saw their risen Lord they were afraid
(as the other Gospels tell us). Maybe Jesus had come back from
the dead to pour out His vengeance now upon mankind for what they had
done to Him. “Jesus has come back from the dead, and boy is
He angry!” But with His words of peace, Jesus assures both
them and us that His resurrection does not mean further warfare with
God, but that the warfare is over. Jesus let God take out His
wrath on Him instead of you. And by raising His Son from the
dead, the Father has confirmed that He has accepted Christ’s
sacrifice for your sins and that with with His blood shed on Calvary
Jesus has reconciled you to God. Death and the devil have been
defeated, and your sins of rebellion, rejection, and hatred against
both God and man have been answered for and forgiven. Jesus has
won the battle, and He won it for you. Now Jesus says to you,
“Peace be with you!” And at these words, we like the
disciples can be glad and rejoice, because they remove all fear of
God’s judgment and wrath.
And there’s no negotiating here. God
doesn’t come to the bargaining table with you and tell you what
He expects from you to bring about this peace, as if He’s done
His part; now you have to do yours. No! He has done all the
work for you. You can either believe His words, or you can reject
those words and continue to fight against Him. But know that if
you continue to do the latter, you’ll lose. Jesus gives His
disciples both the power to forgive sins and to withhold
forgiveness. God’s peace is delivered to you through the
forgiveness of your sins. As the Apostle John writes elsewhere,
“If we confess our sins, God is faithful and just to forgive us
our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” When
you surrender to God’s Word and confess yourself to be the sinner
and enemey of God that He says you are, instead of hearing words of
condemnation you will hear words of forgiveness and peace from
Jesus. But if you remain unrepentant, stubbornly insisting on
living in your sins, insisting on fighting against God, then you will
not hear words of forgiveness and peace, but words of condemnation and
wrath.
The resurrection of Jesus, however, assures you that
as far as God is concerned, the war is over. He is no longer
angry with you. His wrath on account of your sins was completely
poured out onto Jesus on the cross. He now proclaims peace to you
through the servants of His Word. He even gives you His
Son’s body and blood to eat and to drink in the Lord’s
Supper as a seal of this peace. This is the very same body and
blood that we crucified and spilled when we nailed Jesus to the cross
with our sins. And yet the eating and drinking of this body and
blood does not work condemnation in you (provided you eat and drink by
faith in Christ’s words). Instead, it works in you the
forgiveness of sins, life, and salvation. It is the food of
immortality, just as Jesus says, “Whoever eats my flesh and
drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last
day.” And so, with this food Jesus confirms His words of
peace to you, assuring you not only of peace with God in this life, but
also of eternal peace with God in the life to come at your own bodily
resurrection from the dead.
The celebration of the resurrection of our Lord,
then, is a celebration that we are now and forever at peace with God
through the work of our Savior, Jesus Christ, which He accomplished on
the cross for us. He has not come back from the dead in order to
pour out His wrath on you, but to assure you that God does not want to
be your enemy. He does not want to punish you and send you to
hell; He wants you to repent of your sins and receive His pardon and
peace. For this reason He has instituted the pastoral
office. Here today, as on every Sunday, God is giving you His
pardon and peace through the proclamation of the forgiveness of your
sins and through the eating and drinking of Christ’s body and
blood. God wants you to live under His peace in Jesus, living out
that peace towards one another here and now in this life, and then to
live in peace together with Him in His heavenly kingdom forever in the
life to come, when Jesus raises you from the dead on the last
day. Take these words of your Lord, then, to heart as words that
He speaks to you personally: “Peace be with you!” and
know that they deliver just what they say - peace with God on account
of your crucified and risen Lord. Christ is risen! He is
risen indeed! Alleluia! Amen.